There is a trend in marketing that might surprise you. [convertkit form=5018200]

It’s taking the internet by storm, growing mom-and-pop online shops and big brands to new heights.

But the power of this marketing channel doesn’t come from digital ads or a search engine. It’s coming from seemingly everyday people like you and I. These people are influencers. And some of these influencers have more devoted fans than popular movies or TV shows.

How to Connect with Noteworthy Influencers, Without Breaking a Sweat

Alright. You’ve found the influencers you want to reach out to. You’ve qualified each influencer to make sure they’re a match. Perhaps you are starting to feel a little nervous… like asking a girl to prom.

You could reach out to her on social media. But I would recommend using email for these three reasons:

Many influencers want requests in their inbox. This is simple. When an influencer asks for business requests sent to her inbox, do so. The polite thing to do is not barrage her with tweets or DMs on Instagram. Craft an effective email and send the pitch to her inbox.

An inbox is more personal. When an influencer is on social media, there are distractions demanding her attention. She has 35 comments, 172 notifications, 12 lunatic fans, on top of what she needs to get done to keep her fans happy. In the inbox, you are only competing against a few other businesses.

Tracking and automation. There are many tools to help you track, follow up, and automate your responses on email (I use MailShake). This helps you to increase response rates by setting it up once.

Another option to email outreach is to use influencer marketing platforms.

You will find that blogging influencers are usually not listed on these platforms. So for bloggers, again, it’s often best to connect with her by email.

For social media influencers, some platforms allow you to buy a shout-out like you buy a product on Amazon. This requires no outreach. But keep in mind that for larger contracts, you may want to connect with an influencer before buying her services.

Other platforms use a private message system. In a sense, this acts like an email. So whether you use an email or send a private message, here are seven outreach best practices to follow.

We’ve sent over 50,000 outreach emails over the last 9 months for link building and PR purposes.

A lot of people will disagree with me, but outreach is a numbers game, plain and simple. Even if you have the right person, with the right pitch, people are busy and email is annoying – there’s still an element of chance.

If I had ONE tip to increase your positive responses, it helps to find the right people. However, finding the right people costs a lot of resources and time.

If you do not qualify influencers to work with, you will waste your time answering irrelevant emails. You will also waste your budget on influencers who do not influence potential customers. And you can damage your brand and reputation working with the wrong influencer.

If you try to work with the wrong influencer, you deserve to get slapped (Source).

Do yourself a favor. Do the research, because you will get a higher return on your investment.

Outreach Tip #2: Tantalize With An Appealing Subject Line.

You aren’t going to get responses if no one even opens up your email. My best subject line is a word smash of our company’s name and the other person’s name. It usually ends up being quite funny and always gets opened!

Others like John Rampton of Due find subject lines do best when they “address the key problem my audience is having.”

Sean Bestor, Head of Content at Sumo, loves using questions in his subject lines. As he puts it, asking questions are “like catnip for opens.” In his article on cold emails, Sean gives this example:

You can see the difference when I take subject lines we’ve received (that we didn’t open):

FW: Checking in
One minute demo
Sumo – Business Opportunity
Your site

And turn them into questions:

Everything ok?
Want to see what I can do in a minute?
Do you think this is a good idea?
Did you know this was on your site?

You’re INSTANTLY more curious with the second set of subject lines.

Once the influencer has opened your email, now it’s time to woo her with your email. To start off…

Outreach Tip #3: Keep It Short, Silly.

Don’t write more than 100 words. If it’s longer than 100 words, you need to rewrite your email.

Why is it worth taking the time to shorten your emails? Simple.

Shorter emails reduce the chances of the influencer getting distracted.

Everyone’s time is limited. Therefore, it’s important to state your purpose and give people the freedom to respond or ignore your message. Don’t be selfish by wasting your email recipient’s time [with lengthy emails].

Outreach Tip #4: Don’t Try to Sell Too Soon.

In the same way, an influencer won’t want to work with you from a random email sent to her inbox. The problem most marketers have is that they focus too much on their goals and not what’s in it for the influencer.

Adam Connell, the founder of Blogging Wizard, has some brilliant advice to help you get into the right mindset when doing outreach.

Would you respond positively to an email that boiled down to, “Hey person I don’t know. Give me your precious time to help me, and I’ll do absolutely nothing to help you in return.”

I wouldn’t. So here’s what you should do instead:

Focus your outreach email about what you’ll do to help the person you’re trying to connect with. What’s in it for them?

You could share their content, offer to fix a glitch on their site, or something else – it doesn’t have to be too substantial but it has to have meaning.

Let’s say you want to do a guest post for a blogger. One issue facing a lot of bloggers is accepting a guest post from someone who doesn’t share it or reply to comments.

One added benefit you can include in your outreach email is that you will share the post with your audience and reply to comments. It may seem basic but it could make the world of difference.

Instead of directly selling an influencer in the first email, you should…

Outreach Tip #5: End with a (Soft) Bang.

A statement feels demanding. But a question opens up a friendly conversation.

If you end every email with a question, you invite the influencer to respond with a clear call to action.

I sometimes use smileys and emoticons to keep my outreach emails as personal and casual as possible. I also like to wrap my email up with a PS, such as mentioning an article they wrote and say what I liked about it.

Cheesy? Perhaps. But the goal should be to make the email feel like it’s coming from one human to another.

Murray Newlands, the founder and CEO of Chatty People, takes a rather novel approach by taking conversations from their customer service messaging bot to personalize an email.

There are a lot of guides out there all about trying to butter people up and faking relationships with lines like “I’ve been following your blog for years!” or “I loved your last post (that I didn’t actually read)!”

Look, people aren’t stupid. Most people know how cold outreach works and they know that most outreach messages are just asking them for a favor. So, the most polite thing you can do is to just get to the point.

The key is to do outreach for pieces that are worth doing outreach for.

If you send me a message with something truly great, I’m much more likely to engage with it. If you waste my time with junk, then I won’t be happy.

Tyler’s advice goes back to tip #2, which shows you respect an influencer’s time.

Outreach Tip #7: Make It Easier to Say “Yes!”

Do you remember what I said earlier? Influencers are busy. So make it easy for her to say yes.

You can offer proof of past success. Or you can give her a done-for-you solution. If you show her why this opportunity is worth her time, she will be glad to work with you.

To improve your chances, it’s also important that you approach an influencer as an equal. Shanelle Mullin, content & growth marketer at ConversionXL explains:

Too many people approach cold outreach as though they’re begging the influencer to do them a favor.

Let’s say you work in PR and you want to connect with a journalist at Mashable to write about your client. Instead of writing a 1,000-word pitch, focus on how writing about your client will benefit the journalist or the publication.

If you have a hard time doing this, consider how journalists are evaluated by their bosses.

[On the other hand], don’t act like you’re doing them some huge favor. Just turn your pitch into an authentic win-win.

When I first reach out to influencers, brands and publications where I eventually want to get published, the conversation never starts by diving into what I want out of the deal.

I [also] make sure that I have a reason to reach out. Maybe that’s in the form of a feature on my blog, in a piece I wrote for my Forbes column or otherwise—the point is that I always provide upfront value in my email outreach.

Everything else can come in time if you establish a relationship based on providing value first.

One of the most common ways to show passion for a maker’s work is to share their content on social media. To find their content, I like to use a tool like Crate which will pull in the top blog posts shared on a specific domain or that a user has shared.

Outreach Tip #9: Follow Up Effectively.

A baby cries. The cat video beckons. People forget. Life happens, so make sure to politely follow up after a few days.

There are many ways to do follow up emails effectively (and I will touch on this more in the next article).

One reason why people don’t do follow up is that they think their email will hit the spam folder.

The truth is, the odds that your email gets flagged as spam is the same for the first email as the 5th. Manuel Medina, CEO of Outreach.io explains in this short video:

These are the results they found looking at the data of millions of sales emails. If an increase of well-crafted follow-up sales emails doesn’t increase the number of messages that hit the spam folder, then neither should outreach emails.

Before we dive into what you should write in your email, it will be helpful to look at what you should not do. That way, you can catch yourself before sending a poorly written email.

Consider this email:

Subject: Business opportunity for you

Hi Samantha,

My name is Frank with Acme Co. and we offer recovery supplement drinks.

This past year we worked with many CrossFit bloggers, resulting in $2,100 for reviewing our product, RunnersAide.

If you’re interested in working with us, let’s set up a quick call. I would love the opportunity to work with you.

All the best,

Frank

I would give this email a C+.

There are some influencers who would respond to this email because the email did not violate all nine rules.

Frank kept the email under 100 words. He provided some context by mentioning Acme works with CrossFit bloggers. And he also gave some social proof, stating he has worked with many other bloggers and that they earned an average of $2,100.

Which means there’s run for improvement. Let’s look at how Frank should write his email, following my seven outreach tips:

Subject: can I give you $2,100 Samantha? 🙂

Hi Samantha,

I came across your article on being a peace with your training.

I loved it! I constantly obsess over my training results. I’m excited to try out your techniques next time I hit the gym!

My team at Acme Co. has worked with many CrossFit bloggers like you who have reviewed our signature drink, RunnersAide.

The typical influencer made $2,100 for their review. We can provide you with pictures, talking points, and a free case for you to try.

Would you be interested in having me send you more information about our influencer program?

All the best,

Frank

Doesn’t this email sound more persuasive than the first email? It hits eight of the nine points.

Frank makes the subject line appealing

It’s short.

Frank personalizes the email compliments Samantha in a genuine way.

He also makes a connection between what she is doing and his product showing he’s done his research

The email makes it easy for Samantha to say yes. Frank states the opportunity to earn $2,100 and what he will provide to help her succeed.

Frank doesn’t forcefully sell her on the idea.

And the email ends with a question.

And if Frank follows up if Samantha doesn’t respond, he’s nailed it.

Perhaps Frank could deliver value to Samantha before sending this email. You may find this necessary when working with celebrity influencers. But you could send this email as-is and still get a high response rate.

If you would like some more guidance, here are three more email templates to try:

Email Use: Product Launch Email

Subject: Quick question FIRSTNAME…

Hey FIRSTNAME,

I saw you promote A SIMILAR PRODUCT and thought of you for something I’m about to launch.

NEXT WEEK, we are launching OUR PRODUCT. It’s like SIMILAR PRODUCT but focuses on SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

We’ve worked with Mary The Paleo Chef, Irena Macri, and many other paleo bloggers like you. We can provide you a buy-one-get-one-free code, recipes to use, and a box of our PRODUCT for you to enjoy.

Any interest in having me send you more info about our product launch?

Cheers,

Jason

***

Email Use: Evergreen Product

Subject: Quick question FIRSTNAME…

Hey FIRSTNAME,

I recently came across your video NAME/LINK. Great video. I can tell you are passionate about SOMETHING YOU ENJOYED!

My team at COMPANY has been working with other influencers like you, who’ve made an average of $2,100. We can provide you a 25% off code, recipes to use, and a box of our PRODUCT for you to enjoy.

You’ll get 20% of all sales made, paid out in 30 days (or three days if you send an email to your list).

Would you be interested in having me send OUR PRODUCT to review for your audience, FIRSTNAME?

Cheers,
Jason

***

Email Use: Follow-up Email

Hey FIRSTNAME,

I’m sure you’ve got a bit on your plate, so I to follow up to see if you were interested in doing a video review.

Most paleo influencers we’ve worked with make $2,100 per promotion.

Would that be of interest to you FIRSTNAME?

Cheers,
Jason

Final Thoughts

If I had to boil everything I knew about effective influencer outreach into a simple formula, it would be this:

Research + Relevance + Reward = Response

Research: Like a marathon, if you want to finish well, you need to prepare. To prepare for email outreach, you need to do your research.

Relevance: If an offer is not something that interests an influencer, it will be ignored.

Researching relevance requires you to find out if they have a relevant audience. It also requires you to make sure you have relevant values and goals. Essentially, you are looking for a product/influencer fit.

Then let influencers know about that fit by explaining why they should work with you in your email.

Reward: Influencers want to work with you. But again, she’s busy. Why should she work with you, rather than the 12 other companies that pitched her this week?

Reward her by making it faster, better, or more profitable to work with you. Go beyond paying more money and reward her with what she desires.

By doing good research, knowing the types of influencers, and what rewards best motivate her will lead to a higher response rate. A higher response rate leads to more revenue for your business.

And if the numbers work for your business, keep using this recipe as you scale up.

It was the height of the Dot Com era. New businesses began to embrace going online and getting a website.

Like many others, Dan began into the world of internet marketing out of necessity. He began to build websites for his band and his dad’s sculpture studio. People began to come to Dan, asking how they could get more visibility and traffic from Google.

One day, Dan was sitting in his car, listening to the SEO 101 podcast, when it finally clicked: there were people who were doing SEO full-time. Suddenly, Dan was bit by the SEO bug.

He has been a Moz Associate since 2012, writes for the Moz blog and has spoken at dozens of marketing and business events such as SMX and Affiliate Summit.

In this episode of the 80/20 of Growth, I interviewed Dan to find out the key elements to growing your site exponentially with SEO.

Jason’s Notes With Dan Shure

What Are the Basic Building Blocks of SEO?

Mainly people forget this first step, and instead focus on getting rankings from Google. You need to start with a business model to know the overall idea of what you are doing.

Second, you need content. Are you going to have a blog? A podcast? A product and service page? What is the main action you want people to take?

When Dan started offering SEO, he started by going local, targeting Worcester, Massachusetts. This helped get his foot in the door.

How Do You Start Getting Content Ranked in Google?

It’s all relative to your competition and your market. The landscape will be different if you are competing in a ride-share platform against Uber, Lyft, and Skurt, compared to something like escape rooms, which is an industry that is on the rise.

It starts with thorough keyword research to understand the landscape. What are your customers searching now? Possibly in the future?

Use tools like Google trends or Google correlate to know the foundation. What are the buyer-intent keywords? What are the top-of-funnel keywords you should targets?

There are 3 phases, each that have tools that you can use to help you:

How Do You Find Prime Opportunities in the Search Results?

Start by making it a habit to ask yourself why something ranks whenever you use Google. Use the Mozbar to help guide your analysis.

If you see results from these sites, it’s a good indicator you can rank quickly – Quora, Slideshare, Entrepreneur.com, Forbes. The biggest advantage over these sites is your domain has greater relevance to a particular target.

Then, evaluate the content to see where the gaps are and as cliche as it sounds, write the best content for it.

How Can a Smaller Site Be Able to Outrank a Bigger Site?

There are two paths:

Brian Dean’s method – Start by creating 10x content. Then, follow up with manual outreach and a ton of link acquisition. Shoot for the top, get everything underneath.

Find the long tail (Dan’s preferred route) – find phrases that are 3-5 words long. They might only get 10-100 searches/month according to Adwords.But you’ll get more traffic than you realize because:

There are other keywords you’ll rank for

The keyword tool doesn’t give all information

What Are the Biggest Wastes of Time Pursuing SEO?

Focusing on tactics and forgetting to provide the user value.

Is your content solving an user’s problem? Or just simply attacking a keyword?

What Is Your System in Getting Rankings in Google?

Keyword research. Do a data dump of all the keywords.

Use a content calendar to plan your approach. Consider seasonal trends, how often you can post, the order you should publish.

Go to town and create the content.

What Is a Skill in SEO That Someone Should Hone in and Master?

Learn how to capture and hold someone’s attention. Is it a promise you make in the title? An emotion you put forth? Is it the image? Twitter is a great way to practice this.

Think about content from the top-down. What does the headline say? What is the first image they see? What is the first sentence they read? How do you keep people engaged, all the way through?

If you are getting organic traffic, what should be your priority: improve something ranking near the top of the search results or content that’s getting little-to-no results?

Aim to improve the mid-chunk: Bump what’s performing okay, but not great. Then look towards the content that is not performing.

Ask yourself – What’s in common with posts that are performing well? What’s in common with posts that is NOT performing?

What Tool(s) Should a Marketer Use to Optimize Their Content Better?

Compare this to the search console results. Is it getting impressions? What’s the average position? Then use that data to decide if you should combine articles, upgrade it, or create another article entirely.

How Do You Get in Article from Position 20 to the Top of the Search Results?

Is there are keyword relevance match for this article? What keyword could the article rank for? How do you get an alignment with the keyword user intent and your content? Is your content truly better than what is already out there?

It could be your domain authority is not high enough. In which case, you may need to get into doing some outreach or promotion. Even just using paid Facebook ads can also work too.

What to Do Believe True Related to SEO That You Think Most Do Not?

There is far more value in the long-tail than people realize.

One client did an article on “Sales Team Names,” which had 990 searches/month. Within a month, they were #1 and getting tons of traffic.

Another client, we did an article on using an iphone to take photographs. At the time, Google said it had 10 searches/month. Two years later, he had got over 110,000 unique visits, from a random trending topic.

To grow from 0 to 50,000 visitors a month, I set simple benchmark goals to make sure I am on track to hit my final goal. Here are my goals:

Month 1

1,000

Month 2

2,000

Month 3

3,000

Month 4

5,000

Month 5

7,500

Month 6

10,000

Month 7

15,000

Month 8

20,000

Month 9

25,000

Month 10

30,000

Month 11

40,000

Month 12

50,000

For month one, on top of getting 1,000 visitors, I want to find out what promotion will work long term. The faster I know what content promotion channels will help me reach my goals, the faster I can double down on what’s working and cut what’s not working.

Brainstorming Content Promotion Ideas

Brainstorming ideas to promote your content is not difficult. If you take two minutes, you can easily come up with ten ideas to try. But if you are constantly trying new ideas every month, eventually you will get stuck. So try this:

Have you ever stopped to think about what marketing is all about?

In simple terms, marketing is about discovering where your customer’s attention is, and drawing their attention to your business. By knowing this definition, you can begin to create clever ways to accomplish your goals once you ask the question of where your customer’s attention is.

For example, Kyle Pursell is the Growth Lead for Inman News, a leading news source for those in real estate. When he asked the question of where a realtor’s attention is captured to promote their upcoming event, Pursell thought of connecting with barbers as a possible marketing channel.

Think about it. If you are stuck in a chair for 45 minutes with someone you trust to cut your hair, why not listen to a 2-minute pitch from your barber about an upcoming event?

As original as this idea sounds, there is always a possibility of failure along with the chance for success. Consider this:

What if no barbers want to pitch the event?

What if the barbers cannot communicate the value of the event?

What if the realtors forget to check out the event after their haircut?

Although experience can give you a better idea of the likelihood of success, in the end, there’s no guarantee that an idea will succeed. You never know how profitable an idea is until you put the idea into action.

And if an idea costs $1,000 and 200 hours to implement, you don’t want to wait that long before finding out the idea is a flop. That’s why you must prioritize your ideas if you hope to see results faster.

Prioritizing Content Promotion Using the “ICE” Methodology

Unicorn startups like DropBox, Yelp, and Uber did not become big because they had a great product. They became big because they prioritized what was the best way to promote a great product using the “ICE” methodology.

When growth marketers Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown studied what makes startups successful, they saw growth teams prioritizing ideas based on three factors:

The impact the idea would have on their business.

The confidence they had that the idea would succeed.

The ease oreffort to put the idea into action.

Each idea is given a score on a scale of 1-10 for each factor. After adding up the score, you can prioritize what idea you should pursue first.

Because the “ICE” methodology is a principle of time management, you could apply this concept on a more detailed level to A/B testing or content promotion.

We also can filter ideas that have too low of an impact on your business or too high of effort to put into action. By establishing your goals, as I talked about earlier, helps you to consider what ideas to pursue. Because if the impact score is not high enough, then you know to not pursue that idea. If the idea takes too long to generate meaningful results, you can cut those ideas too.

However, by using a minimum viable test, you can decrease the amount of time and money spent before you see results.

What Is a Minimum Viable Test, and How Can an MVT Be Used to Accelerate Growth?

A minimum viable test is the minimum amount of effort needed to validate whether a marketing channel will produce the results you desire.

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a Facebook group to promote your posts.

Instead of starting a Google Plus Community, writing up the rules, and taking the time to moderate the community, what if you started by joining a relevant Google Plus community and promoting your article in the group? This approach will save you time if you find out your customers don’t spend time on Google Plus.

After you decide that a minimum viable test shows positive results, you will want to figure out how to make the process both repeatable and scalable.

So if your customers spend time on Google Plus and you get enough traffic from sharing the article, you can decide if the traffic is worth the time to start your community. If it’s not worth the time, you have validated that Google Plus Communities are a good opportunity to promote your articles.

Seeing a few examples in action should help you get a better idea how this process works. Do keep in mind that works for me may or may not work the same way for you. You never know how well an idea works until you put it into action.

10 Minimum Viable Test Examples to Promote Content

Let’s take a look at ten ideas I used this past month to promote the Cofounders With Class blog.

1. LinkedIn Group Promotion

For social media communities, LinkedIn groups are strange. I’ve seen articles I’ve promoted get engagement a month after posting in them. Groups that were filled with spammy articles can get still get decent traffic.

To use LinkedIn Groups, I looked for business, marketing, and e-commerce groups with a minimum of 25,000 members. In addition to typing a few keywords, the easiest way I found to find relevant groups is to find influencers in your niche and see what groups they are in. Once you join the groups, simply hit the LinkedIn share button and promote the article to each of your groups.

Ways to scale: Hire a VA to collect the names of LinkedIn groups, get their emails, and target them with Facebook ads.

2. Facebook Groups Promotion

Impact: 6

Confidence: 9

Ease: 7

Minimum Viable Test: Promote an article in a Facebook group.

When promoting your articles in Facebook groups, you will want to make sure that the Facebook group gets a decent amount of engagement per post and that the group accepts articles.

You can’t drop a link to your article into a Facebook group and expect to get meaningful traffic. My recommendation is to write a short paragraph that will provide the reader an idea why they would find the article valuable.

I’m testing a theory that by adding in a relevant question, I can also increase the number of people who comment on the article. If you get people to comment on your post, engage with them in a meaningful way. Not only will this increase the traffic you get, building relationships in a community increases the likelihood that those people will want to engage with you in the future.

3. Quora Promotion

Impact: 8

Confidence: 7

Ease: 5

Minimum Viable Test: Promote one article by answering one question on Quora.

To start, I used Ahrefs to find relevant questions in Quora that was ranking in Google. After I had written my article, I copied and pasted different parts of my article in Quora and wrote some new content too. Then, if someone wanted to learn more about the topic, I included a link to my article. Finally, after publishing the article, I asked some friends to vote for my article (an acceptable practice on Quora, but not on most voting sites).

In less than 24 hours, I received over 1,000 views on Quora. Later that week, Quora included my answer in their weekly newsletter.

Ways to scale: Funnel the traffic into a Facebook group, keep answering more question and get featured in news publications, or try adding lead magnets into the answer.

4. Influencer Promotion

Impact: 6

Confidence: 9

Ease: 4

Minimum Viable Test: Reach out to men’s style bloggers to get them to promote my articles.

When I started this experiment, I had no intention of building up relationships in this niche because networking done right is time-consuming (but worth it!). But that doesn’t mean I need to avoid connecting with influencers either.

I start by identifying the type of influencers I want to connect with for a project, and usually for promoting a blog, those are fellow micro-influencer bloggers. To find these influencers, I start by doing Google searches for “top men’s style bloggers” or “best men’s fashion blogs.” I qualify the list, put together an outreach plan, and start connecting with these bloggers.

Ways to scale: Relationships are challenging to scale. However, there are numerous opportunities with those relationships, such as cross-promoting each other’s products, co-hosting webinars, and referencing each other’s blogs.

5. Write About the Business on Another Blog

Impact: 3

Confidence: 8

Ease: 3

Minimum Viable Test: Write an article on another blog and look at the referral traffic.

Meta, right?

When Edward Dennis of Coredna encouraged me to start this series, I had no intention of using it as a promotion tactic. My goal was to simply write what I learn so that others could benefit from what I’m doing.

The way I’m doing this is by talking about the marketing tips and strategies I’m using to grow the business, and when relevant, I link to the other business in my blog posts.

Ways to scale: Typically referral traffic is very low. The best way to scale traffic is optimizing your second blog for SEO.

6. Scoop.it Promotion

Scoop.it is a simple promotion tactic. All you do is do a search for curators in your niche, share a link to your article, and viola! You can also create your own curated articles for others to read.

While I did not think this would be a good traffic source, Scoop.it does give a very high DA link, although it’s a nofollow link. Depending on your school of thought, perhaps that nofollow link helps with SEO.

Ways to scale: Scoop.it limits you to the number of times you can pitch using a free account. You can either upgrade your account or hire VAs to pitch more curators.

Be an active member of reddit (some redditors pride themselves in checking your profile for spammy behaviors),

Submit something the community finds valuable, and

Write an engaging headline specific for the subreddit.

Engage with the community in the comments.

Ways to scale: Find new communities that also would adore your content. Be careful that you don’t over post though.

8. Ask Meta Filter Promotion

Impact: 6

Confidence: 9

Ease: 4

Minimum Viable Test: Promote one article answering one question.

Meta Filter is a forum community that is similar to Reddit with a bunch of topics for people to discuss. Unlike Reddit, they ask for a $5 membership fee to weed out spammers (and keep their platform running).

Ask Meta Filter is one sub-forum where members of the forum ask the community a question they have (think like Reddit meets Quora). You can also filter the questions by category tags to find questions related to your topic. Once you find a relevant question, answer it to the best of your ability and link back to your articles when relevant.

Ways to scale: Answer more questions.

9. SEO

Impact: 9

Confidence: 9

Ease: 4

Minimum Viable Test: Write an article once per week targeting high volume, low competition keywords. Look for organic traffic within three months.

I’m too impatient for SEO. Even getting 50 visitors in month one feels kinda lame (yeah, I know, you are supposed to wait six months to get SEO traffic, blah, blah, blah…).

But I’d be foolish to ignore this highly potent promotion channel. In fact, SEO is the backbone of my promotion strategy.

There’s a lot more to SEO than I can cover in a short blurb here (I’ve shared some of what I do to optimize on-page SEO here). But this is a simple behind-the-scenes look at some of my process for getting more SEO traffic to the blog:

Get everything set up in Google’s Search Console. GSC gives better search insights than Google Analytics, including what your site needs to do to have everything up-and-running on your site.

Write an in-depth article targeting one keyword. Make it not just thorough, but useful. If targeting multiple keywords, I look at what Google Autosuggest and Google’s “Searches related to…” queries are when I Google the main keyword.

Promote the article. If you do solid keyword research, this step won’t matter as much.

Use SEO Math to determine the minimum number of links to build to an article.

The challenge is that most visiting the site want information to improve their business, not their style. However, once I bridged the gap why the content would be valuable to this audience, I started promoting on these two communities.

Ways to scale: Promote more articles on IB/GH or target other marketing/entrepreneur communities like /r/entrepreneur.

Over to you: What do you want to test to grow your blog? What score would you give it using the “ICE” method?

My buddy Ashley Faulkes said you are a great go-to guy who has helped him a lot.

What has been your favorite tool to use and why is it important to you?

Thanks Ian,

~Jason

(Do note this isn’t an actual email I’ve sent, but what I might say if I wanted to get their advice about Twitter. Also, if you want toknow more about Twitter, click on their names above. I linked to some of their most shared Twitter articles.)

By referencing these other experts, it shows you are connecting with others who they probably know as well.

Now you may say to yourself, “I don’t know Ashley Faulkes, what should I say then?”

Another route is to simply state why you believe Ian has an opinion worth sharing.

Additionally, the email above also uses the social proof of Ileane and Mike.

Whatever you do, do NOT say something that is false.

Someone may get away with it for a while. But it will be their demise once the web of lies come undone.

7. Be wise in the follow-up

Sent the email and haven’t received a response back yet?

First, remember they’ve got a life too.

Give it a few days. Then, if you don’t hear back, reply to the email you sent.

In doing so, they don’t need to dig for the original email you sent.

How should you respond?

Try something like this:

“Hey [name],

Had not heard back from you yet. I’m sure you get a lot of emails, so I just wanted to float this to the top, just in case it got lost.”

Keep it polite and keep it simple.

8. Do you need a response?

This might seem strange since the point is to reach out to someone. But if you are trying to add value to someone’s life, you shouldn’t make every email
transactional.

Recently, I saw that Evernote is now found in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

While this was not something I find hugely valuable, I knew those in the SEO world might find it valuable.

So, I shot Dan Shure of Evolving SEO this email:

If Dan wanted to write a blog post about it, he’s got an idea to use.

Or if he decided to send it out as a tweet (which he did do), he’s got a snapshot to use.

The SEO Expert Search Process

With over 1.2 billion websites, it’s a challenge to find the best people to follow, and get quality advice from to grow your website.

Though there are many top lists, sometimes these are little more than experts listing their friends.

Data isn’t biased; just the people who interpret it.

According to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial,” or “natural” search results on search engines.

Since Google processes over 3.5 billion searches a day, this can amount to several thousands of free visitors to your site every month; if you build your site right.

Which is where search engine optimization comes in.

To find out who are the most influential SEO experts around the world, I compared the scores of 3 sites: Klout, WeFollow, and FollowerWonk.

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FollerWonk considers the social authority of these influencers on Twitter. While it is easy for people to star a tweet, a re-tweet carries the brand message to their followers.

WeFollow uses a prominence score using an algorithm similar to linkbuilding with PageRank. The more people of influence connected to the account, the higher the score.

Since not every influencer was found on WeFollow, the total score is an average of the 3 sites on a scale of 1 to Oprah (err… 100).

After analyzing over 800 SEO accounts, here is…

The Top 100 SEO Experts to Follow, Backed by Science

100. Jordan Kasteler

Jordan Kasteler is a seasoned professional and an Internet Marketing consultant specializing in SEO and Social Media Marketing.

Jordan’s work experience ranges from in-house SEO at Overstock.com, marketing strategy at PETA, to agency-level consulting. Currently Jordan uses his SEO expertise as the Senior SEO Manager at Red Door Interactive.

As an SEO expert, Eric has worked with Cafe Press, HostGator, Intuit, KitchenAid, Mint.com, Salesforce, TurboTax, Yahoo, RandomHouse, and Sony. Eric has a blog and podcast at Growth Everywhere where he gives insight on business and personal and interviews world-class successful entrepreneurs.

97. Garth O’Brien

Garth O’Brien, formerly a practicing attorney, transitioned his career to pursue his passion for Digital Marketing and SEO. Since 2002, Garth has leveraged SEO and SEM and along the way incorporated Social Media and Content Marketing.

He is a former Search Director for Catalyst, a leading search marketing agency, and owned the SEO programs for Hallmark, Windows Phone, Xbox Support, IKEA USA and many others. He now is the Director and Global Head of SEO for GoDaddy.

96. Jason Acidre

Jason is a Manila-based Search Strategist and SEO expert. Formerly a professional counter-strike player, in 2010 he became an SEO Specialist and is now the CEO and Lead Search Marketing Strategist of Xight Interactive.

Jason aims to constantly learn new skills that interest him to complement his creativity. He always sets to challenge himself in breaking through greater heights each time he succeeds, making learning a never ending cycle.

95. Kevin Gibbons

Kevin is the Managing Director of BlueGlass, a strategy-driven digital marketing agency. Having been in the digital marketing industry since 2003, Kevin founded a search agency in Oxfordshire in 2006 and formed BlueGlass in 2012.

Kevin has used his SEO expertise and experience working with a number of large brands, including Deloitte, M&G Investments, Miele, Momondo, Vistaprint and Tate.

94. Nick Stamoulis

Founder of Brick Marketing, Nick has worked with hundreds of companies small across all industries since 1998. Through his vast web marketing and SEO expertise, Nick Stamoulis has successfully increased the online visibility and sales of clients in multiple industries.

93. Nick Eubanks

Nick is a technical marketer focused on finding ways to use data to answer questions and solve problems. Through his organization, he has leveraged search to organically grow websites to millions of visitors, several times, without spending $1 on paid advertising.

His team’s approach to SEO is from a technical and mathematical perspective, using information and analysis to guide the projects, and test everything.

Not only is Nick an SEO expert, he claims to be the #1 Seller of Traffic Cones in America.

92. Chris Winfield

Chris Winfield is a passionate entrepreneur and success strategist, who lives in New York City with his wife, and daughter. An “eternal student of life,” Chris is on a quest to constantly improve the world and himself.

Over the past decade and a half, as an SEO expert Chris has worked with many of the world’s best known companies, including Disney, Virgin, Macy’s, Viacom, Conde Nast, Intuit, NBC, Time, Inc. & many others.

91. Glenn Gabe

Glenn Gabe is a digital marketing veteran with over 19 years of experience. With a heavy focus on SEO, SEM, Social Media advertising, and Web Analytics, Glenn currently helps clients maximize their digital marketing efforts.

89. Laura Lippay

Laura is a consultant and marketing executive based in Silicon Valley. Over the years, she has worked with many prominent brands, including Red Bull, several Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL entertainment and lifestyle properties, Icelandair, and Nylon Magazine.

Currently Laura has been the Organic Search & Technical Optimization Lead for Netflix. She has held previous roles including the Technical Marketing Director for Yahoo Media and SEO Specialist for CNET.

83. Sujan Patel

Sujan Patel currently is the VP of Marketing at When I Work, and had previously founded Single Grain. Sujan has helped companies like SalesForce, TurboTax, Sony, Mint, KitchenAid, LinkedIn, and hundreds of others.

Through SEO and other marketing stategies, Sujan will help you acquire more customers, build brand awareness, and grow their businesses.

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82. Lyndon Antcliff

Lyndon has a deep experience in website usability, having started building websites since 1998.

As an SEO expert, Lyndon specializes in content marketing management to help websites produce content that attracts, persuades and influences their readers.

Lyndon’s works have been seen in publications like Time magazine, Wired, Mayo radio show, and Fox News and mentioned by BBC, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

78. Kevin Raposo

An once notable drummer for a metal band, Kevin is the founder and owner of KnowTechie, a tech blog for people who love tech, but live outside the bubble.

On KnowTechie, Kevin writes about tech, internet, social media, and other digital related topics. The mission of KnowTechie is to keep the articles short, simple, and informative, allowing you to find out what you need to know quickly and efficiently.

77. Lisa Barone

Lisa’s obsession with characters, their stories, and how they share their message is as ingrained in her being as her dark hair and eyes. As a marketer, this makes her dangerously good at her job as she is able to create stories that consumers resonate with as a fiercely story-driven consumer herself.

Through this ability, Lisa can create a brand personae to connect you to your audience and make them give a crap about who you are.

76. Barry Adams

An SEO expert and polemicist, humanist & twitter ranter, Barry is the Dutch founder of Polemic Digital, an expert SEO consultancy in Belfast, Ireland. Barry Adams started Polemic Digital in 2014 as a specialised SEO consultancy.

As an active SEO practitioner for over 15 years, he has earned a fair share of accolades. A true specialist and counted among the top SEO providers in Europe, Barry has a wealth of SEO knowledge to give.

75. Mike King

While you may associate Michael King being an SEO expert, his career and contribution to digital marketing is far bigger. While at Publicis Modem and Razorfish, he was working for major brands like Ralph Lauren, Johnson & Johnson, LG, and Citibank.

As the former Executive Director of Owned Media, Mike led teams that covered consumer insights, content, social strategy, SEO, marketing automation and technical marketing for brands like SAP, HSBC, SanDisk and Wharton.

Currently, Mike has been working as the founder & digital marketing consultant of iPullRank, providing the same great service to many companies.

74. Craig Wilson

A digital marketing consultant, Craig now resides in Australia and is the founder of Australia’s leading inbound marketing agency Sticky Digital, an automated website analytics and SEO system NLYZR, InsiderJobs, and Newcastle’s online magazine UrbanInsider.

Craig is an accomplished sailor and cyclist who has lived in Finland, Washington and Colorado.

73. Paul Shapiro

An amateur programmer and horror and zombie movie guru, Paul Shapiro is a search marketer that loves to take both a technical and creative approach to SEO.

Currently Paul works as the SEO director for Catalyst. Through them, Paul has worked with Procter and Gamble, Volkswagen, BlackRock, Eveready, Royal Caribbean, Colgate, Sam’s Club, General Electric, Humana, HSBC, AtTask, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, YSL, and SAP.

Paul also moderates Reddit’s “bigseo” sub-community, where you can find advice from some of the top SEO experts.

72. Andrew Shotland

A pioneer in getting Showtime and NBC online, Andrew has had quite the experience from the early days of the Internet.

At Showtime, Andrew hosted the very first web chat with Mike Tyson, covering his first match after getting out of prison. As the general manager of NBC.com, Andrew was instrumental in getting TV viewers to connect online, which paved the way for many networks to follow suit.

Andrew later moved to becoming the head of product and business development for Insider Pages, which was later bought by CitySearch.

Since 2006 Andrew has been running LocalSEOGuide.com, an influential local seo blog and a full service SEO consulting company specializing in both multi-location SEO and enterprise SEO consulting.

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71. Angie Schottmuller

The former Chief of Conversion Marketing for Unbounce, Angie is now an inbound marketer for ThreeDeep Marketing, a digital marketing agency providing lead generation and marketing automation solutions.

As an inbound marketing and SEO expert part of Forbes “10 Online Marketers to Follow in 2015,” Angie is skilled at wielding magnetic content optimized for search, social, conversion and mobile with over sixteen years’ multichannel B2B and B2C experience.

Angie has worked for brands like Nestle USA, Gerber, Andersen Windows, and The Home Depot. Adept at harnessing online and emerging technologies to drive tangible results for improving business – social engagement, lead generation, sales conversion, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy.

Angie also is on the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) Board of Directors and columnist for Search Engine Watch.

70. Ross Hudgens

Founder of Siege Media, a no B.S content marketing agency that builds content for the sole purpose of making your company better through content development, promotion and maintenance, and a specialty in SEO.

Marketing runs deep in Ross’s veins as the former Marketing Assistant for Janix, Senior SEO Analyst for SingleGrain, and SEO Manager for MediaBoost and Full Beaker, Inc.

67. John McTigue

Every organization has that one person you can look to for answers and direction. With 33 years of professional experience, John strives to find the right combination of marketing strategies that will deliver each client a defined ROI with his SEO expertise.

John believes all marketing efforts should have clear, measurable business objective. These efforts that have been instrumental in Kuno Creative achieving the HubSpot Happiest Customer award for the past three years.

63. Bob Rains

A former bartender, cook, and server at The Royal Canadian Legion Dominion Command, Bob now seems himself as an SEO nerd.

As a hands-on leader with expertise in branding, advertising, media planning, website development, and both online and offline marketing campaigns, Bob has quite the breadth of marketing acumen beyond just as an SEO expert.

62. Duane Forrester

Duane is the Sr. Product Manager for Bing’s webmaster outreach program. He has had over 15 years of direct search and online marketing experience, including planning ad campaigns, managing ad buys, and running e-mail campaigns.

Chances are good, if it’s a search, blogging or online marketing conference, Duane will be there.

60. Rhea Drysdale

Known as “The Woman Who Saved SEO,” Rhea is now using her SEO expertise as the CEO of Outspoken Media, a digital marketing agency that grows, protects, and manages brands online.

Rhea speaks often on the subjects of online reputation management, search engine optimization and link development at conferences like Search Marketing Expo, PubCon, Web 2.0 Expo, SEMNE, and Social Media Breakfast.

59. Bas van den Beld

Bas has been doing PR and Marketing for Linkdex and Momentology.com, and is the founder of State of Digital, a site to help marketers know how to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

Bas is a master at knowing the ever changing digital marketing space. It may surprise you to find out that the secret to his success as an SEO expert comes from his grandma.

58. Dan Sharp

Dan has an uncanny ability to help Screaming Frog‘s clients stay ahead of the competition. How does Dan do this? Simply by researching and monitoring the latest developments in search and predicting tweaks to the search engines’ ever evolving algorithms.

Using his SEO expertise, Dan also designed and managed the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, one of the leading onsite technical SEO auditing software in the industry.

When not being a geek he likes to spend time with family and friends, travel and chat about football to everyone who cares to listen (which in his words, is nobody at Screaming Frog).

55. Dennis Goedegebuure

Dennis is a Dutchman living in San Francisco who loves photography, travel and blogging. Formerly the director of SEO at eBay and head of global SEO for AirBNB, Dennis now works as the VP of Growth & SEO for Fanatics, the ultimate fan shop for sports apparel and fan gear.

54. John Doherty

John Doherty is the founder of Credo, a marketplace connecting businesses with the best digital marketing and growth professionals and agencies. He was formerly senior growth manager at Trulia Rentals, head of marketing at HotPads.com, and a senior consultant with Distilled in New York CIty.

John has lived in 9 cities in the last decade, including two years spent in Europe in a hippie community. He’s passionate about being outdoors, whether cycling, skiing, hiking, or doing any other number of extreme sports. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Courtney and their very large black labrador Butterbean.

51. Bill Slawski

Bill Slawski is the president and founder of SEO by the Sea. After working for the Superior Court of Delaware for 14 years, in the mid ’90s Bill started helping a couple of friends put together a website for an online business.

While continuing to help his friends gain visibility, he began starting to work on promoting other sites as well and soon became a prominent SEO expert.

Bill started SEO by the Sea in 2005. Through his blog, he is committed to offering information as accurately and helpfully as possible, while remaining civil as well as fair and impartial.

50. Kim Krause Berg

Kim started into the online world in 1995 when a neighbor showed her AOL. From that first interaction, she decided to teach herself how to make websites. A few months later, she was hired by a local company to build and promote 13 websites.

Kim has taught and worked in SEO since launching Cre8pc.com in 1997. In 1998, she founded Cre8asiteforums.com. Later in 2002, Kim began practicing and teaching what she terms “Holistic Usability and SEO”.

49. Adam Audette

An active member of the search marketing industry since 1996, Adam contributes to the strategic direction of Merkle | RKG’s paid and organic search marketing services.

Previously, Adam founded AudetteMedia, a leading SEO agency. Through his company, he partnered with premier brands like Zappos, Gannett, Kroger, HSN, Charming Shoppes, University of Phoenix, Amazon, and Michelin.

47. Marcus Tandler

Marcus is a German search theorist geek and is absolutely in love with SEO! He is the Co-Founder and Managing Director at OnPage.org – an award winning, leading technical SEO software with the mission to help Webmasters make better websites.

Marcus is also the host at SEOktoberfest, a SEO ThinkTank for savvy SEO experts from around the world. He has also presented a TED talk in Munich on “The future of search“.

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45. Tamar Weinberg

Tamar is a woman who has worn many hats, from Global Advertising Director at Mashable from 2007 to 2013, to her current positions as the founder and CEO of Techipedia, Chief Strategy Officer at Small Business Trends, LLC, Social Media and Social Customer Experience Manager at Namecheap, Director of Business Development at AddShoppers, and VP of Customer Success at Shelf Inc.

Dave runs the company with his beautiful wife Becky and 20 other diligent employees as the Head of Search Marketing. Together they have helped several major brands like Digg, Virgin Holiday Cruises, and SaxoBank.

43. AJ Ghergich

A serial entrepreneur and founder of Ghergich, AJ has been heavily involved in the SEO industry since 2004. His focus has been on blending his SEO expertise with Content Marketing, Social Media, PPC, Ecommerce, & Infographics.

If you are looking for someone to help you create powerful, persuasive content that earns your customers attention and earns better rankings, AJ is your man.

42. Will Critchlow

Will Critchlow is the CEO of Distilled, a company he founded in 2005 with Duncan Morris. Distilled provides online marketing services from offices in London, New York and Seattle, hosts the SearchLove conference series in the US and UK and produces the popular online training platform DistilledU.

41. Cynthia Johnson

Cynthia Johnson is a partner and Director of Marketing & Social Media at RankLab, a digital marketing agency in Santa Monica. Through her company, she has also applied her SEO expertise with companies like REI, 3M, and North Face.

Cynthia has been very involved in social media and has been in an instrumental role for viral campaigns with Levi’s, Vans, Chevy, Susan G. Komen, Peta2, and Maker Studios.

She has been referenced by Forbes, Inc Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine.

40. Peter Caputa

Peter has worked with 100s of businesses directly as the VP Sales at HubSpot. With all clients he works with, he is able to achieve predictable, measurable and improvable ROI from the marketing and advertising services they provide.

39. Adam Singer

Adam Singer is an Analytics Advocate at Google, a marketing SEO expert, media and PR industry speaker, and startup adviser and blogger. Singer has have been cited by top media outlets such as TechCrunch, AdWeek, NY Times and more for creative use of digital marketing and PR.

37. Jon Henshaw

Imagine a neutron star, spinning at 1,122 rotations per second. Then stick it inside a person, and you’ve got Jon.

Jon Henshaw is the co-founder of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a company designed to help Internet marketers manage and report on all their online marketing with expediency.

Jon has been involved with website development and Internet strategy since 1995. Before Raven, he worked as an Interaction Designer for Visa in Denver, CO, where he helped develop Web applications for their consumer and corporate customers.

36. Kristi Hines

Kristi is a freelance writer and professional blogging expert on online marketing including content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and web analytics. She is also the creator of ContentPromotionPlan.com.

Kristi has helped many people create high-quality blog content, lead magnets, ebooks, and powerful web copy for many businesses. Her work has been published at Social Media Examiner, HubSpot, Search Engine Watch, Unbounce, KISSmetrics, iAcquire, FreshBooks, PostPlanner, and SumAll.

These articles have generated over 300k social shares and receive over 150k clicks from Google search visitors per month!

35. Matt McGowan

Matt McGowan has led quite the fascinating life. He has done everything from a stint on Wall St, executive manager over two startups, and running Incisive Media’s North and South American Advertising Technology business.

Currently Matt is responsible for cultivating deep relationships, building partnerships with the major advertising agencies, in addition to driving awareness, perception, and adoption of Google’s products and technologies.

Matt has been a contributor to Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, ClickZ Asia, and SES Conference and Expo.

33. Alan Bleiweiss

Alan Bleiweiss calls himself a Forensic SEO Consultant, Author, Trainer, Speaker, and “snarky rant” specialist. For 20 years, Alan has been providing Internet marketing professional service solutions from sole proprietors to Fortune 500 companies all across the United States.

Some of the companies Alan has given his SEO expertise to include PetCo, Disney, NBC/Universal Studios, Mashable, UGG Australia, Beats by Dre, and the ChamberofCommerce.com.

32. Vanessa Fox

Named one of Seattle’s “Top 40 Under 40” and “Top 25 Innovators and Entrepreneurs,” Vanessa uses her SEO expertise as the CEO of Keylime Toolbox, a robust software that provides key SEO metrics and analytics. Vanessa takes a fresh approach to understanding SEO with comprehensive reference library, tutorials, and answers.

29. Melissa Fach

These days, Melissa now works as the Community Jedi on social media for AuthorityLabs, as an Associate at Moz.

Melissa is the owner of SEO Aware, a marketing consulting company that offers Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Content Marketing, Blogging, SEO Copywriting, and Web Design Development. Due to her obligations, she only works with a select group of clients.

26. Lisa Buyer

Lisa Buyer is an expert in Social PR and an advocate on the influence that public relations can have on SEO and Social Media.

Whether it’s analyzing a social identity system, launching a brand on social media, creating effective sound bytes, developing a digital publicity campaign, making sure Google knows about them, or acting as the corporate therapist, clients turn to Lisa when they are looking for the best marketing consultation.

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Brian started The Carter Group back in 1999 and has the opportunity to work with many major companies, including Microsoft, NBC, The U.S. Army, Universal Studios, The World Health Organization, Marketo, Salesforce, Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.

23. Gianluca Fiorelli

Gianluca is an International SEO Expert & Inbound Strategist Consultant. One of the few independent consultants Moz suggests hiring. He started working in the Web Marketing Industry in 2004 and since then he offered his services as an independent consultant.

No one like Gianluca has such a deep knowledge about crafting effective SEO and Inbound Marketing strategies. His approach is enhanced by an equally rich understanding of targeting audiences, designing brand storytelling, and creating synergies across different forms of media.

20. Aaron Wall

In 2003, Aaron launched SEO Book originally as a blog that offered DIY SEO tips. His site has since expanded into offering an expansive SEO training program.

Over the last couple years, SEO Book has been mentioned in iMediaConnection, Marketing News, Slashdot, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, Wired, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, Time Magazine, The Register, MSNBC, and The Guardian.

19. Dr. Pete Meyers

Guarding the thin line between marketing and data science, Dr. Pete works on the projects that no one else understands. This SEO expert is the keeper of the Algo History, the architect of the MozCast Project, and the watcher of all things Google.

Dr. Pete is an avid content marketer, especially “big” content. Currently he is beginning to explore how is research can impact the future of our tools, and looking forward to pushing that forward in 2015 and beyond.

18. Cyrus Shepard

Cyrus Shepard is the Senior Content Astronaut at Moz. After moving to Seattle, he picked up a book and started learning HTML and soon created his first student website. Ever since then, he has been a huge fan of online marketing and has become quite the SEO expert.

Cyrus loves tackling tough SEO problems and helping online businesses spread their online marketing message. Cyrus was also the editor of the 2012 edition of the Beginners Guide to SEO.

17. John Rampton

After being run over by a large skidster on a construction site in 2006, he believed his dreams of ever walking again would come to an end. As he began an experimental stem-cell treatment in 2007, he began to learn online marketing. With nothing else to do, John began spending 16-20 hours a day, pouring into the art and science of marketing.

Since then, John has been named #3 on Top 50 Online Influencers in the World by Entrepreneur Magazine, as a blogging expert by Forbes, and been awarded top 10 most influential PPC experts in the world for the past 3 years.

He writes for Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, Inc, and Huffington Post and specializes in Content, Conversion Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media, and Online Marketing.

16. Douglas Karr

Douglas is an established leader in the marketing technology space as the CEO of DK New Media and CMO and co-founder of CircuPress. Douglas’s SEO knowledge combined with his cross-channel marketing expertise has put him at the short list of search engine consultants.

He has worked with multi-million page brands and ecommerce sites, with clients including Angie’s List and GoDaddy. Douglas primarily assists in marketing technology related companies with their online marketing presence and establishing their authority in the marketplace.

You may also know Doug as the author of Corporate Blogging For Dummies. Though the chapter on SEO has become outdated, it is still a great primer into becoming part of the blogosphere.

15. Michael Gray

Michael Gray became involved in web development and website management in 1997. As the former webmaster for Fortunoff, Michael helped them go from earning under $10,000 a month to over $25 million in annual sales.

14. Travis Wright

Some people drive cars to work. Travis drives traffic, leads, and social media channels to websites as the Chief Growth Officer at MediaThinkLabs. He knows the digital marketer’s secret sauce, then creates, curates and amplifies all blog content. Then he micro-targets it to the right audience with organic and paid advertising.

Travis has developed business processes for any of your social needs: social channels, social selling, social support, and social recruiting. Travis is a full stack marketer, growth hacker, and social media strategist.

13. Joost de Valk

As a web developer and online marketer, Joost has worked with several large businesses around the world, ranging from the local grocery store to giants like eBay and Salesforce.com.

In 2006, Joost focused his SEO expertise to start Yoast, a company that is a crossover between a software development shop and an SEO agency, currently employing over 21 people.

One such software is the WordPress SEO Plugin, one of the top WordPress plugins to help WordPress website owners optimize their site for SEO. In fact, it has been used on over 3,500,000 websites! As an agency, one of their biggest projects was the migration of guardian.co.uk to theguardian.com.

12. Neil Patel

An entrepreneur, investor, blogger, digital marketer, and analytics junkie, Neil Patel has done some incredible things in the SEO world. He is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, KISSmetrics, and writer at QuickSprout.

11. Mike Volpe

Mike Volpe is the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform. After joining as the 5th employee in 2007, he has helped them grow to 13,500 customers, 2,000 partners, 750 employees, and a $125mm IPO in October of 2014.

Mike helps lead the company’s lead generation and branding strategy through inbound marketing strategies such as blogging, search engine optimization, video marketing, and social media.

Mike has given over 50 talks on Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Blogging for Business, Improving Website Conversions, Video Marketing, and Lead Generation.

10. Shane Barker

As as SEO expert, Shane have continued to dominate the SEO and social media landscape as a consultant for some of the top Fortune 1000 companies and as the VP of Digital Marketing for Kamere, a platform built to enrich people’s lives by connecting people and organizations with personalized, meaningful inspirational content.

Shane is a serial and social entrepreneur who has a passion for SEO and Internet marketing.

8. Lee Odden

Lee Odden is the co-founder and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a nationally respected digital marketing agency that has consulted with some of the top B2B brands in the world including: McKesson, Dell, LinkedIn, StrongView, Marketo, Livefyre and HP.

With roots in SEO dating back to 1997, Lee has evangelized an integrated approach to search, social media and content marketing in over 100 conference presentations all over the world.

7. Brian Clark

Brian has been mentioned in many books, including Linchpin and Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin, The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau, Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Brainfluence by Roger Dooley, The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg, and Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt, among many others.

Recently Brian launched a curated email newsletter called Further, which provides science-backed tips for living your best life.

6. Ann Smarty

Ann has been a guest blogger and as she began building relationships in the blogosphere community, she began to understand the power of a guest post.

Taking that idea to a greater scale, in 2009 she started myblogguest.com to help bloggers reach new audiences, build up their brand, network, and get great exclusive content.

Ann is the community and brand manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas since 2012, focusing on regularly contributing to the Internet Marketing Ninjas blog and serving as an internal SEO resource for the team.

In July of 2014, Ann started MyBlogU as a content marketing platform to help bloggers and writers collaborate together to create and promote epic content.

4. Dharmesh Shah

In 2006, Dharmesh Shah co-founded HubSpot alongside Brian Halligan, the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform. They were on a mission to help businesses attract, engage, and delight customers by delivering inbound experiences that are relevant, helpful, and personalized.

Prior to founding HubSpot, Dharmesh founded Pyramid Digital Solutions, an enterprise software company in the financial services sector. After 11 years in the business and receiving the Inc. 500 award, Dharmesh helped the company get acquired in August 2005 by SunGard Business Systems, a large $11 billion technology company.

3. Rand Fishkin

Rand first became involved with the World Wide Web back in 1993. After helping many Seattle businesses setup their digital shop online, in 2002 he got involved in the field of search marketing.

In 2004, Rand co-founded Moz with his mother Gillian, which is today one of the fastest growing software companies in the marketing world. Beginning as an SEO consulting company, Rand has helped lead Moz to stay true to their core beliefs: to be as Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional as possible (TAGFEE).

Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He co-authored and co-founded the Art of SEO, Inbound.org, and Moz. As you can see, he clearly likes doing stuff with other people.

2. Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. Currently the head of Google’s Webspam team, he works with the search quality to minimize search engine optimization issues.

As one of the co-inventors listed upon a Google patent related to search engines and web spam, he advises and has made statements to help on related issues related to the use of the Google search engine.

As of July 2014, Matt has been on leave to spend time with his wife and completing goals such as a half-Ironman race he finished.

1. Danny Sullivan

It is no surprise that Danny is the #1 SEO expert.

Danny first started writing about how search engines worked back in April of 1996. That’s before the days of Google. Since then, he was the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch and is now the founder and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land.